Writers on Writing

Estelle Erasmus is a 2025 TEDx Speaker and an award-winning writing professor at New York University. An award-winning journalist, she has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Next Avenue/PBS, HuffPost, Business Insider, Marie Claire, WIRED, AARP the Magazine, and more. Her essays for The New York Times and The Washington Post have gone globally viral, and she has appeared on Good Morning America and Fox News, with her work mentioned on The View. She’s on the show to talk about her book, Writing That Gets Noticed: Find Your Voice, Become a Better Storyteller, Get Published, named a “Best Book for Writers” by Poets & Writers.

Today is all about non-fiction. Estelle joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about writing essays, finding your voice, hooks, braided essays and hermit crab essays, writing scenes, queries, pitches, and more.

For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website.

(Recorded February 27,, 2026)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Jayne Anne Phillips has been on the podcast at least three times. First in 2000, with her novel MotherKind. Again in 2014 with Quiet Dell, and the last time in 2023 with Night Watch, before it was announced as the Pulitzer Prize winner. Raymond Carver pronounced her first story collection Black Tickets “stories unlike any in our literature…a crooked beauty” and established Jayne Anne as a writer “in love with the American language.” She published that collection in 1979 when she was only 26. She was praised by Nadine Gordimer as “the best short story writer since Eudora Welty” and Black Tickets has since become a classic of the short story genre. She’s also the author of Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, Lark and Termite, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2009.  

Her latest memoir-in-essays, Small Town Girls, is comprised of 22 pieces tackling everything from the profoundly personal to the historical and sociological. We learn the backstory behind the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys and the long and complicated history of West Virginia. We learn about Jayne Anne’s close relationship with her mother, her experiences with religion, abortion, a mass shooting, and — most important for today’s discussion — her lifelong relationship with writing. There are essays about other writers, essays reflecting on the difficulty and necessity of writing, and what this practice has given Jayne Anne, and us, for her entire career. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about all of it.  

For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website.

(Recorded April 13, 2026)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of thirty books of fiction, including The Tortilla Curtain, Talk to Me, I Walk Between the Raindrops, and most recently, No Way Home. He received a Ph.D. degree in Nineteenth Century British Literature from the University of Iowa in 1977 and his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1974. His work has been translated into more than two dozen foreign languages, including Lithuanian, Latvian, Farsi, and Vietnamese. His stories have appeared in most of the major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Atlantic Monthly, and he has been the recipient of many literary awards, including the PEN/Faulkner and the PEN/Malamud. He lives with his family near Santa Barbara.

T.C. Boyle joins Barbara to talk about what he needs to know before he begins writing, how he decides whether an idea fits the short story format or novel, theme, writing multiple point of view characters, concerns that find their way into his work, and more.

For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website.

(Recorded March 27, 2026)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Louise Erdrich in one of those relatively rare authors who has won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. She’s authored 19 novels as well as story collections, poetry collections, children’s books and nonfiction. Her first novel, Love Medicine, was the only debut ever to with the National Book Critic Circle Award for Fiction.

The Round House won the National Book Award in 2012. The Night Watchman won the Pulitzer in 2021. Her latest story collection is Python’s Kiss. It contains 13 stories, two of which already appear in this year’s The Best American Short Stories and The O’Henry Prize Winners Best Short Stories. Five of them were in The New Yorker. They’re historical fiction, science fiction, ghost stories, love stories. And they’re accompanied by gorgeous artwork from Louise’s daughter — Aza— that only adds to the depth of these stories.

Louise joins Marrie Stone to talk about the collection, including playing with points of view, world building, landing the ending, the creation of effective lists, titles, how animals can work in fiction, managing time in a short story, and so much more.

For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website.

(Recorded April 6, 2026)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Dylan Landis is the author of three works of fiction in the Rainey Royal Cycle, set in 1970s Greenwich Village: List of All Possible Desires, a novel in stories; the novel Rainey Royal, a New York Times Editors’ Choice; and the novel in stories Normal People Don’t Live Like This. Her work has appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and she has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction. In a past life she wrote six books on interior design. She lives in Los Angeles.

Dylan joins Barbara to talk about writing a novel with standalone stories, how she comes up with her incredibly original similes and metaphors, dramatic arc, revisions, characters that won’t leave us alone, and the four things a reader needs that writers should keep in mind, and more!

For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It’s stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you’ll find an album’s worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It’s perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website.

(Recorded April 3, 2026)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)